December 8, 2020


Jennifer Lame, ACE – the twice Eddie Award-nominated editor of character-driven dramas Manchester by the Sea and Marriage Story – teamed with Christopher Nolan for the first time on the director’s latest globe-trotting sci-fi espionage thriller, Tenet. Nolan has spoken about his ability with longtime editor Lee Smith, ACE, to craft action sequences in films like Inception and Dunkirk. With Smith unavailable (working on 1917) Nolan sought an editor who would shape the action scenes while curating the story in his new movie.
Written by Nolan, the film centers on John David Washington’s Protagonist, a secret agent working to manipulate the flow of time to prevent World War III. As with Nolan movies like The Prestige and Interstellar, the script deconstructs linear storytelling and our idea of memory, this time by playing three major set pieces forward and backward. The concept is reminiscent of 1962 French classic of time travel La Jetée (reworked by Terry Gilliam in 12 Monkeys) which has a central character witnessing their own death.
Lame was in the middle of mixing Marriage Story in New York when she got the call to say she was on the interview listfor Nolan’s project. She describes what happened next. “I was shocked when I got an interview for it,” says Lame. “It didn’t even occur to me I would get the job. I was a mixture of disbelief and excitement. It was so unexpected. I assumed maybe he was making a smaller indie movie back to his roots and that was why I was on the list. “I got a call on the Monday to be in L.A. on the Thursday. I thought, it would be exciting just to meet him so I went to L.A. for 24 hours. I had no material to prepare for the interview which is a little unusual.”
CinemaEditor: What did you talk about in the interview?
Jennifer Lame, ACE: I really admire his work but I was also nervous. When we met, we talked about his approach as a filmmaker and his process technically – about IMAX and how he does the DI, how he finishes photochemically. Then it was over really quickly. I only felt we’d just met. He asked me had I any other questions and I said is there anything you can tell me about the movie? He said it was a very large-scale big action movie and I made some joke like ‘have you seen my resume?’ He added, as I departed, that this would be one of the most difficult movies to edit ever. ‘The editing is incredibly difficult,’ he said. He was saying that with a smile – he wasn’t being literal – but it just seemed like a crazy way to end an interview. A couple days later I had a phone interview with Emma Thomas (the film’s producer and Nolan’s wife). Again, it was really short but she asked really perceptive questions like ‘why did I want to work on such a big movie?’ She wanted to get to the heart of what interested me about the project.
CE: Why did you want to work with Christopher Nolan?JL: That was a question I’d thought about a lot. I’m not the type of person who will do a film for the sake of it. I wanted to do it for the right reasons and not just because it was a Christopher Nolan movie. I knew I’d have to travel around the world which would have implications for my family. The conclusion I came to was that I’ve always been a fan of his work especially his earlier movies like Following, The Prestige and Memento. One reason is that he can make both small movies
and big-budget blockbusters which very few filmmakers can do well. I feel like his sensibilities as a filmmaker are rooted in being an auteur and that he makes $200-million movies with a small crew on set to retain that intimate indie filmmaking spirit. A few days later, I got the call!
CE: How did you begin to wrap your head around the script?
JL: In script form it was definitely difficult to understand. Once I got the footage it helped so much. One of the things I found throughout the movie was that I’d have days where I’d get frustrated by thinking too hard. By overanalyzing it became more difficult. On other days I was more clearheaded. I learned that it’s easier to understand the film when you don’t overthink it and I think that goes for the audience too. I had the same reaction with Inception – your emotional response to the film is more important than trying to dissect it. If you try to pick it apart you will lose the emotional connection to the characters. If you take things at face value and don’t overcomplicate things, you enjoy it more.
CE: A pivotal scene in the narrative around which the film seems to tilt, is when Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) is interrogated by Russian oligarch Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Tell us about that.
JL: This is the blue-and-red room scene and we had to nail it for an audience to follow the rest of the film. The blue and the red is the first time visually that you see the mechanics of the world and how it works. The challenge was that we were showing the same sequence twice, back to back. So, how do we make that visually interesting and give it energy aside from the cinematography and set design. How do we ensure the audience follows it? Working on this sequence really me helped me to understand the mechanics of how the film works. On the one hand it functions to explain the mechanics of the world to the audience and on
the other this is an incredibly emotional narrative turning point. It’s when Kat gets shot and potentially killed – twice – and the Protagonist realizes that he has put her in that situation. We need to register the emotion on John David’s face and understand his character’s struggle to reconcile what he has done. I’d play the backward dialogue forward to be totally sure it made sense. It took a long, long time to get it right. It’s kind of mind-boggling that it works on so many different layers.
CE: How did you build a working relationship with Nolan?
JL: I was with the production all the time, traveling to every location (including Estonia Italy, and the U.K.). [Nolan] has a film dailies trailer and a mobile screening room which is pretty unique. Every evening all the HoDs would watch dailies which was so helpful. I’d be sitting next to him so I could ask him any questions.
The first scene I worked on was the prologue, filmed in Estonia and set in a packed opera house. It was the first piece I showed him. That was pretty stressful since I was trying to keep up with the shoot and cut the prologue but it was incredibly helpful because I got to know how to work with him very quickly. He was very involved in the edit room. He is very direct about his ideas but also very open to saying when he didn’t know how to figure something out. I think he is like that with all his collaborators. He knows what he wants but is happy to let others chime in. He’s also very fast, extremely meticulous and detail oriented. That kinda blew my mind. And he always hit deadlines.
CE: How did you cut the fight scene in the airport secure vault?
JL: I cut the fight scene pretty early on and it was a useful process in working through how I would approach the rest of the film. In the film, the scene plays forward the first time around and then backward later in the story but in either case I decided to approach it as a normal fight scene in a normal movie. At first, though, I did feel like I got bogged down organizing the footage and making a list of different bins and labeling everything into different parts of the fight. I had all these different sections that I needed to make sure worked both ways. I had to use the right piece of film for each sequence. Fortunately, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema had used perspective differently in his coverage so I was able to use different angles from the point of view of the characters to find a way to build each sequence. I made so many different cuts before I realized I was overthinking things and settled on cutting it like a normal fight.
CE: If editing is the art of manipulating time, Tenet appears to take this to the limit.
JL: Yes and I thought about this a lot especially with the scenes that are shown twice like the vault fight scene and the red/ blue room scene. I didn’t have to mirror everything perfectly since the scenes are from different perspectives, but of course it had to feel the same in many ways such as when dialogue was involved. It couldn’t feel repetitive even though it also had to be repetitive in some ways. Sometimes I found working on a Christopher Nolan movie is like watching a Chris Nolan movie!
I would play a scene forward and then play it backward and then I’d understand the bigger picture at play and suddenly it was less daunting and then I would feel free to attack the scene on a deeper level. So many layers. So exciting for an editor.
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